We don’t need to go to Mars to expand our species out into space and increase our long term viability. In fact, Mars is probably not a great place to put down roots.
Asteroids are a much better destination for that.
Now, I see what you are saying, and so I suppose that it is because I don’t have kids that I can look at what is best for all of us, not just what is best for my kids right now this very instant.
And what if we are not spending trillions of dollars on this, but rather, making money by reaping the rewards of the resources that are in space, and while doing so, also advancing the human presence?
Apathy may delay the technology, but there are enough people out there that are not apathetic that we may get it done in spite of the selfish and lazy nature of humans that you have brought up.
Robots would be better at asteroid mining, however the advances in ship building would make the field of asteroid mining more profitable.
Eventually humans will become an interplanetary species, and eventually an interstellar species (even if we can only travel at 20% of light speed). Advances to make that happen are going to require smaller steps like going to mars. But learning to go to mars will make it easier to build ships that can mine asteroids for needed raw materials.
Not the poster, but it means “end thread” to me. The slash is used in coding to end tags. So Stranger’s answer was so good that no one else need comment.
The short-fingered vulgarian supposedly wants to send people back to the moon, for no scientific reason I can see. I assume it’s more of the usual dick-wagging.
Given his pussy-grabbing proclivity I can understand his excitement about re-defiling the great Sky Virgin.
I see that last as the other way around. Mining asteroids for just base materials would make it easier for us to build a ship to go to Mars (and beyond) using resources already in space.
I don’t see us building everything up there, electronics and engines and manufactured parts like that would need the existing logistical supply lines on Earth for the time being. But even if it is just the superstructure that holds modules launched from Earth, that is an enormous savings on launch costs. If we can produce fuels from mined materials, that’s another huge savings.
Keep in mind that going to Mars is going to need pretty significant shielding from radiation (and micrometeorites) for that journey. Launching that much shielding would be prohibitively expensive, but just using what is already up there to thicken up the hulls would provide the same protection at a fraction of the cost.
Maybe even go so far as to catch an asteroid and put it into a cycler orbit,then you don’t have to accelerate all that shielding and mass and structure, but instead, only need to launch the people and their supplies to rendezvous while the larger ship (you could even call it a station). If we ever have any interplanetary trade or travel, these cycler orbits will become very important. I see it as having a permanent population that travels the whole way around, while picking up travelers going to and from these destinations.
I am optimistic that we will eventually become an interplanetary species, and if we get that far, I see no reason why we wouldn’t eventually go interstellar, but I doubt it will be at anything close to 20% the speed of light.
You can’t really just do that. If you tried to spin up an asteroid for gravity, it would just fly apart. The “gravity” that you would be producing would be much greater than the actual gravity of the asteroid, so the only thing holding it together at that point would be the rigidity of the material itself, which on most asteroids is not very high.
Better to just tunnel into it and build your base as you go. You can spin up parts of your base, or the whole thing, while it is under the surface, protected from radiation and interplanetary debris. You get the mass of the asteroid to act as a momentum bank for spinning or stopping your rotation.
My plan would be to put a smallish asteroid, less than a mile across, into the orbit first. Then as space infrastructure improves, more larger ones could be added to other cycler orbits. Some of the orbits take longer than others, so a larger base would be more useful for a longer journey. If we start going out to Jupiter or further, then we are talking multi year voyages. That’s not traveling in space, that’s living in space.
If we’re thinking about Mars for bragging rights, it makes a lot more sense to land on Phobos or Deimos. They are both tiny and landing and taking off from them should not present the same kind of problems as landing on Mars or even our own Moon. It would just be a flag planting mission, but for bragging rights that’s all you need, and the odds of the astronauts returning to home are much greater. Never the less, since we can place objects in earth orbit much more readily than back in the moon landing days we should really overbuild the Mars space craft with plenty of redundancy of everything from supplies to airtight compartments and rocket engines, even bringing extra landing and takeoff vehicles.
I think if China went there, regardless of whether or not the crew survived, it would be used as the basis for a claim of ownership. Which is why it would be important for other nations to go there in the same period, if not sooner.
I am 47 and even if I live into my nineties I have no expectation this will happen in my lifetime. Aside from the enormous difficulty and risk, we are vastly more advanced in AI and robotics, which makes a manned mission all the more risky by comparison.
Of course, I suppose no one in the 1930s could have envisioned the Apollo program, either.
I am, as usual, going to buck several trends in this thread. First, I don’t believe that China is at this stage a serious contender. Possibly for a Moon mission in the next few decades, but not for a Mars mission, not on their own. MAYBE if they partner with some other countries like Russia it’s possible.
As for Mars, I don’t think it’s beyond our technical capabilities. I also don’t think it would be the worthless mission many are implying. What I DO think is that it’s not a very good political reality at this stage. It’s politics and funding that are preventing us from going, not technical capability. But political reality IS reality in this case, and without the political will to do it it’s not going to happen soon. I also have my doubts about the 2030’s window at this stage. Currently, NASA says they plan for some trips back to the Moon in the late 2020’s, this time for extended stay missions. I think that’s…possible…politically and from a funding perspective, assuming NASA actually stays on track and focused on that (which isn’t really up to NASA but up to the political whim of the day). The ESA is also looking at manned Moon missions, and vaguely have talked about a Mars mission, but I don’t see that happening.
Really, what will have to happen, IMHO, is that this time it’s not one nation doing it, but a collection of nations and industry working together for such a trip. I think there is some real benefit to having humans go, but until and unless the public and political climate changes it’s probably not going to happen. Certainly I don’t see it happening in my lifetime at this point, as if it doesn’t happen in the 2030’s I’ll most likely not make it to see the next probable windows. Or if I am still kicking around, I’ll be too senile to know what’s happening.
“Stranger’s” post was rad, but I think $200 billion is a pipe dream. I’m thinking it will be closer to half a trillion dollars, and for what? How much more will we really learn from a small, limited manned mission that we haven’t already learned from probes?
Also, there is the real possibility of a political backlash that would result from a failure that would have to be 100% fatal given the distance, amount of time involved, and the impossibility of a rescue mission. It would be catastrophic for NASA economically and from a public relations point of view.
You would need two years worth of food for each member of the crew just for the travel time. That would probably entail sending an unmanned ship full of provisions and landing it at the projected landing site for the manned mission. If you really intend on doing anything more than just picking up a few rocks and some dirt, you would probably have to send heavier excavating equipment on separate missions, too, so that we can get below the surface.
Also, as “Stranger” pointed out, two years is an eternity in space, a huge amount of time for just about anything to go wrong.
I don’t see the “small, limited manned mission”. We are talking about something ranging from 2 months on the planet to over a year. Unless the astronauts are planning to just sit around and do nothing for that whole time, this one mission would have the potential to expand our understanding and data about Mars many fold. In the first month they could go further afield than all the robotic lander probes thus far. They could dig deeper in a week than we have done in several decades, even with the new probes in the pipeline.
Anyway, I think that the $200 billion is closer than your half a trillion, but that’s neither hear nor there. Even that amount of money is technically feasible (the ISS cost more, and so has our Iraqi adventure to give a non-space example)…it’s simply not politically feasible, whether it’s $100 billion or a trillion. Not alone, by ourselves. I think that IF we are ever to go, it’s got to be a joint venture, not just a US alone show. Something like the ISS, where NASA does part but other countries chip in as well. Perhaps with several of the space private companies also pitching in.
I agree, but you’re probably talking upwards of a trillion dollars for a mission of that magnitude. I saw a prediction several years ago that stated that, and costs have only increased since then. You have to convince a nation that is currently being threatened with budgetary cuts to medicare of over $800 billion that Mars is more important than their healthcare. Good luck.
Obviously the mission profile is going to heavily impact the end cost, and since we don’t have a mission profile any estimate of cost is going to be a guess. I’ve seen figures ranging from $40 billion on the low end to a trillion on the high end. But most of the realistic missions I’ve seen range in the few hundred billion mark. Most of the really high end figures have a bunch of added features like a long term space station in Mars orbit that could be reused as a transfer station to the planet and also allow long term study.
I think the costs of space travel as well as the pieces to get things into orbit have come down in the last few years, though they are still obviously really high. So, I don’t see that costs have increased. A lot of the technology for such a mission is still in development, but it’s not at stage one concepts at this point, so I think a good gauge of costs can be done.
Still doesn’t matter, as it’s not really about what we could do technologically or about what we can afford, unfortunately.
The amount of resources for a mars visit is simply mindblowing, however sort of doable in a extreme way - and in that the payoff would be to say we were there. But of those resources were targeted at the moon we could have a ongoing lunar research base, which would be very cool and lasting. So while mars may be reachable at a far stretch for a visit, the moon can be a start of a new home with ongoing missions.
But we also need the political will to do so, which for Apollo ended with a mission that sidelined space exploration, the space shuttle. We also are seeing such a political sidelining now by a orbiting lunar space station.
